The 13th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Lester Del Rey

  He shook his head again. “They’ll probably welcome us with open arms—firearms! It’s enough for one of us to get killed. If I fail, Amos can try—or Flavin. If he fails—well, suit yourself. It won’t matter whether they kill me there or send through bombs to kill me here. But if one of us can get a chance to explain, it may make some difference. I dunno. But it may.”

  Her eyes were hurt, but she gave in, going with him silently as he stepped into the local Bennington unit and stepped out in Chicago, heading toward the Chicago Interstellar branch. She waited patiently while the controlmen scouted out a pressure suit for him. Then she began helping him fasten it and checking his oxygen equipment. “Come on back, Vic,” she said finally.

  He chucked a fist under her chin lightly and kissed her quickly, keeping it casual with a sureness he couldn’t feel. “You’re a good kid, Pat. I’ll sure try.”

  He pulled the helmet down and clicked it shut before stepping into the capsule and letting the seal shut. He could see her swing to the interstellar phone, her lips pursed in whistled code. The sound was muffled, but the lights changed abruptly, and her hand hit the switch.

  There was no noticeable time involved. He was simply on Ecthinbal, looking at a faintly greenish atmosphere, observable only because of the sudden change, and fifty pounds seemed to have been added to his weight. The transmitter was the usual Betz II design, and everything else was familiar except for the creature standing beside the capsule.

  The Ecthindar might have been a creation out of green glass, coated with a soft fur, and blown by a bottle-maker who enjoyed novelty. There were two thin, long legs, multijointed, and something that faintly resembled the pelvis of a skeleton. Above that, two other thin rods ran up, with a double bulb where lungs might have been, and shoulders like the collar pads of a football player, joined together and topped by four hard knobs, each with a single eye and orifice. Double arms ran from each shoulder, almost to the ground.

  He expected to hear a tinkle when the creature moved, and was surprised when he did hear it, until he realized the sound was carried through the metal floor, not through the thin air.

  The creature swung open the capsule door after some incomprehensible process that probably served to sterilize it. Its Galactic Code whistle came from a device on its feet and through Vic’s shoes from the floor. The air was too thin to transmit sound normally. “We greet you, Earthman. Our mansions are poor, but yours. Our lives are at your disposal.” Then the formal speech ended in a sharp whistle. “Literally, it would seem. We die.”

  It didn’t fit with Vic’s expectations, but he tried to take his cue from it. “That’s why I’m here. Do you have some kind of a ruler? Umm, good. How do I get to see this ruler?” He had few hopes of getting to see the ruler, but it never did any harm to try.

  The Ecthindar seemed unsurprised. “Of course, I shall take you at once. For what other purpose is a ruler but to serve those who wish to see it. But—I trespass on your kindness in the delay—but may I question whether a strange light came forth from your defective transmitter?”

  Vic snapped a look at it and nodded slowly. “It did.”

  Now the ax would fall. He braced himself for it, but the creature ceremoniously repeated his nod.

  “I was one who believed it might. It is most comforting to know my science was true. When the bombs came through from you, we held them in an instant shield, since we had expected some such effort on your part to correct your transmitter. But in our error, we believed them radioactive. We tried a new negative aspect of space to counteract them. Of course, it failed, since they were only chemical. But I had postulated that some might have escaped from receiver to transmitter, being negative. You are kind. You confirm my belief. And now, if you will honor my shoulder with the touch of your hand, so that my portable unit will transport us both…”

  Vic reached out and the scene shifted at once. There was no apparent transmitter, and the trick beat anything he had heard from other planets. Perhaps it was totally unrelated to the teleport machine. But he had no time to ask.

  A door in the little room where they were now opened, and another creature came in, this time single from pelvis to shoulders, but otherwise the same. “The ruler has been requested,” it whistled. “That which the ruler is shall be yours, and that which the ruler has is nothing. May the ruler serve?”

  It was either the most cockeyed bit of naiveté or the fanciest run-around Vic had found, but totally unlike anything he’d been prepared for. He gulped and began whistling out the general situation on Earth.

  The Ecthindar interrupted politely. “That we know. And the converse is true—we too are dying. We are a planet of thin air, and that little is chlorine. Now from a matter transmitter comes a great rush of oxygen, which we consider poison. Our homes around are burned in it, our plant life is dying of it, and we are forced to remain inside and seal ourselves off. Like you, we can do nothing—the wind from your world is beyond our strength.”

  “But your science…”

  “Is beyond yours, true. As is our average intelligence. We run from an arbitrary lowest of one to a highest of two relatively, however, while you run from perhaps a low of an eighth to a high of nearly three, as we figure. We lack both your very lows and your genius level—some of you are more intelligent than any of us, though very few. But you are all adaptable, and we are too leisurely a race for that virtue.”

  Vic shook his head, but perhaps it made good sense. “But the bombs…”

  A series of graceful gestures took place between the two creatures, and the Ruler turned back to Vic.

  “The ruler had not known, of course. It was not important. We lost a few thousand people whom we love. But we understood. There is no anger, though it pleases us to see that your courtesy extends across space to us in commiseration. May your dead pass well.”

  That was at least one good break in the situation. Vic felt some of his worry slide aside to make room for the rest. “Then I don’t suppose…Well, then, have you any ideas on how we can take care of this mess…”

  There was a shocked moment, with abrupt movements from the two creatures. Then something came up in the Ruler’s hands, vibrating sharply. Vic jumped back—and froze in mid-stride, to fall awkwardly onto the floor. A chunk of ice seemed to form in his backbone and creep along his spine, until it touched his brain. Death or paralysis? It was all the same—he had air for only an hour more. The two creatures were fluttering at each other and moving toward him when he blacked out.

  V

  His first feeling was the familiar, deadening pull of fatigue as his senses began to come back. Then he saw that he was in a tiny room—and that Pat lay stretched out beside him!

  He threw himself up to a sitting position, surprised to find that there were no aftereffects to whatever the Ruler had used. The darned fool, coming through after him! And now they had her, too.

  Surprisingly, her eyes snapped open, and she sat up beside him. “Darn it, I almost fell asleep waiting for you to revive. It’s a good thing I brought extra oxygen flasks. Your hour is about up. How’d you insult them?”

  He puzzled over it while she changed his oxygen flask and he did the same for her. “I didn’t. I just asked whether there wasn’t some way we could take care of this trouble.”

  “Which meant to them that you suspected they weren’t giving all the help they could—after their formal offer when you came over. I convinced them it was just that you were still learning Code, whatever you said. They’re nice, Vic. I never really believed other races were better than we are, but I do now and it doesn’t bother me at all.”

  “It’d bother Flavin. He’d have to prove they were sissies or something. How do we get out?”

  She pushed the door open, and they stepped back into the room of the Ruler, who was waiting for him. It made no reference to the misunderstanding, but inspected him, whistled approval of his condi
tion, and plunged straight to business.

  “We have found part of a solution, Earthman. We die—but it will be two weeks before our end. First, we shall set up a transmitter in permanent transmit, equipped with a precipitator to remove our chlorine, and key it to another of your transmitters—whichever one you wish. Ecthinbal is heavy but small, and a balance will be struck between the air going from you and the air returning. The winds between stations may disturb your weather, but not seriously, we hope. That which the Ruler is, is yours. A lovely passing.”

  It touched their shoulders, and they were back briefly in the transmitter, to be almost instantly back in the Chicago branch. Vic was still shaking his head.

  “It won’t work—the Ruler didn’t allow for the way our gravity falls off and our air thins out a few miles higher up. We’d end up with maybe four pounds pressure, which isn’t enough. So we both die—two worlds on my shoulders instead of one. Hell, we couldn’t take that offer from them, anyhow. Pat, how’d you convince them to let me go?”

  She had shucked out of the pressure suit and stood combing her hair. “Common sense, as Amos says. I figured engineers consider each other engineers first and aliens second, so I went to the head engineer instead of the Ruler. He fixed it up somehow. I guess I must have sounded pretty desperate, at that, knowing your air would give out after an hour.”

  They went through the local intercity to Bennington, and on into Vic’s office, where Flavin met them with open relief and a load of questions. Vic let Pat answer, while he mulled over her words. Somewhere, there was an idea—let the rulers alone and go to the engineers. Some obvious solution that the administrators would try to understand, run into their preconceptions, and be unable to use? He shoved it around in his floating memory, but it refused to trigger an idea.

  Pat was finishing the account of the Ecthindar offer, but Flavin was not impressed. Ptheela came in, and it had to be repeated for her, with much more enthusiastic response.

  “So what?” Flavin asked. “They have to die, anyhow. Sure, it’s a shame, but we have our own problems. Hey—wait. Maybe there’s something to it. It’d take some guts and a little risk, but it might work.”

  Flavin considered it while Vic waited, willing to listen to any scheme. The man took a cigar out and lit it carefully, his first since the accident; he’d felt smoking used up the air. “Look, if they work their transmitter, we end up with a quarter of what we need. But suppose we had four sources. We connect with several oxygen-atmosphere worlds. Okay, we load our transmitters with delayed-action atom bombs and send one sample capsule to each world. After that, they either open a transmitter to us with air, or we really let them have it. They can live—a little poorer, maybe, but still live. And we’re fixed for good. Congress and the President would jump at it.”

  “That all?” Vic asked.

  Flavin nodded, just as Vic’s fist caught him in the mouth, spilling him onto the floor. The man lay there, feeling his jaw and staring up at Vic. Then the anger was gone, and Vic reached down to help him up.

  “You’re half a decent guy and half a louse,” he told Flavin. “You had that coming, but I should have used it on some of the real lice around. Besides, maybe you have part of an idea.”

  “‘Sall right, no teeth lost—just the first cigar I’ve enjoyed in days.” Flavin rubbed his jaw gingerly, then grinned ruefully. “I should have known how you feel. But I believe in Earth first. What’s this big idea of yours?”

  “Getting our air through other planets. Our air. It’s a routing job. If we can set up a chain so the air going out of one transmitter in a station is balanced by air coming in another in the same station, there’d be a terrific draft; but most of it would be confined in the station, and there wouldn’t be the outside whirlwind to keep us from getting near. Instead of a mad rush of air in or out of the building, there’d be only eddy currents outside of the inner chamber. We’d keep our air, and maybe have time to figure out some way of getting at that hunk of glass.”

  “Vic! You honey!” Pat’s shoulders straightened. But Flavin shook his head.

  “Won’t work. Suppose Wilkes was asked to permit us to route through like that for another planet—he’d have to turn it down. Too much risk, and he has to consider our safely first.”

  “That’s where Pat gave me the tip. Engineers get used to thinking of each other as engineers instead of competing races—they have to work together. They have the same problems and develop the same working habits. If I were running a station and the idea was put to me, I’d hate to turn it down, and I might not think of the political end. I’ve always wanted to see what happened in continuous transmittal; I’ll be tickled pink to get at the instrument rolls in the station. And a lot of other engineers will feel the same.”

  “We’re already keyed to Plathgol on a second transmitter in there,” Pat added. “They could send to us, though the other four transmitters were out of duty. And the Ecthindar indicated they had full operation when it happened, so they’re keyed to five other planets that could trigger them to transmit. But they don’t connect to Plathgol, as I remember the charts.”

  “Bomb dropping starts in about four hours,” Flavin commented. “Atomic, this time. After that, what?”

  “No chance. They’ll go straight through, and the Ecthindar can neutralize them—but one is pretty sure to start blasting here and carry through in full action. Then there’ll be no other transmitter in their station. Just a big field on permanent receive.”

  “Then we’d better find a route from Ecthinbal to Plathgol—and get a lot of permissions—pronto!” Flavin decided. “And we need all the charts we can find.”

  The engineers at the Chicago branch were busy shooting dice when the four came through the intercity transmitter. Ptheela had asked to accompany the three humans, and her offer was welcome. More precisely, two engineers were playing. There was no one else in the place, and no sign of activity. Word of the proposed bombing had leaked out and the engineers had figured that answering bombs would come blasting back through all Earth teleports. They knew what Earth governments would have done and didn’t know of the Ecthindar philosophy. The engineers had passed the word to other employees, and only these two were left, finishing a feud of long standing in the time left.

  “Know anything about routing?” Vic asked. He’d already looked in the big barnlike building just outside the main shell, now empty of its normal crew. When they indicated no knowledge, he chased them out on his Teleport Interstellar authority and took over. He had no need of more engineers, and they were cynical enough about the eventual chances there to leave gladly. Vic had never had any use for Chicago’s manager and the brash young crew he’d built up; word shouldn’t have gone beyond the top level. If it leaked out to the general public, there’d be panic for miles around.

  But Chicago’s routing setup was the best in the country, and he needed it. Now how did he go about getting a staff trained to use it?

  “Know how to find things here?” Flavin asked Pat. He accepted her nod, and looked surprised at Ptheela’s equally quick assent. Then he grinned at Vic and began shucking off his coat. “Okay, you see before you one of the best traffic managers that ever helped pull a two-bit railroad out of the red, before I got better offers in politics. I’m good. You get me the dope, Vic can haggle on the transmitter phones, and I’ll route it.”

  He was good. His mind could look at the complicated interlocking block of transmitter groups and jump to the next step without apparent thought—and he had to have information only once before engraving it on his mind. It was a tough nut, since the stations housed six transmitters, keyed to six planets each—but in highly varied combinations; each world had its own group of tie-ins with planets. Routing was the most complicated job in the work.

  Plathgol was handled by Ptheela, who was still in good standing until her council was informed of her breaking the Law by talking to Vic. There was no
trouble there. But trouble soon developed. The Ecthinbal station had been keyed to only two other planets when the accident happened, it turned out. Vromatchk was completely cold on the idea and flatly refused. Ee, the other, seemed difficult.

  It surprised Vic, because it didn’t fit with Pat’s theories of engineers at all. He scowled at the phone, then whistled again. “All right, no matter. Your zeal is commendable. Now put an engineer on!”

  The answering whistle carried a fumbling uncertainty of obvious surprise. “I—how’d you know? I gave all the right answers.”

  “Sure. Right off the Engineer Rule Sheet posted over the transmitter. No real engineer worries that much about them—he has more things to think of. Put the engineer on.”

  The answer was obstinate. “My father’s asleep. He’s tired. Call later.”

  The connection went dead at once. Vic called Ecthinbal while clambering into the big pressure suit. He threw the delay switch and climbed into the right capsule. A moment later, an Ecthindar was moving the capsule on a delicate-looking machine to another transmitter. Something that looked like a small tyrannosaurus with about twenty tentacles instead of forelegs was staring at him a second later, and he knew he was on Ee.

  “Take me to the engineer!” he ordered. “At once.”

  The great ridges of horny substance over the eyes came down in a surprisingly human scowl. But the stubbornness was less certain in person. The creature turned and led Vic out to a huge shack outside. In answer to a whooping cry, a head the size of a medium-large car came out of the door, to be followed by a titanic body. The full-grown adult was covered with a thick coat of ropy hair.

  “Where from?” the Ee engineer whistled. “Wait—I saw a picture. Earth? Come in. I hear you have quite a problem down there.”